The Blog

Bing SEO: 6 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Bing

Goodness! Have you been presuming that Bing is a waste of your time just because Google is king of the SEO hill?

Although Bing is trailing Google by a ways, it still has a decent chunk of the market; plus, Bing powers Yahoo!’s search.

According to a recent report from NetmarketShare.com, Bing’s worldwide search market share in October was 4.40%. If you add in Yahoo!’s share of 7.62% (which again is powered by Bing), that’s a 12.02% search market share across the globe.

Bing is still popular. Some analysts believe it’s just a matter of time before Bing overtakes Google, as hard as that may be to conceive. The reason? A growing number of users now prefer Bing over Google for its intuitive features and great search options.

Bing is also getting smarter: it beat Google to a valuable feature called disavowing links by a few months.

We certainly wouldn’t try to predict what the future holds for the search marketing industry, but if there’s a chance Bing could beat Google down the road, perhaps it’s time to optimize your site for Bing as fully as you can.

Here are some of the simple ways you may optimize your site for Bing.

Properly manage the length of your site’s content
You’re probably used to churning out 500 words for your blog posts. That will serve you well, since Bing prefers content to be longer than 300 words.

Bing algorithms appear to place greater value on content that is no less than 300 words. The longer your content, the better optimized it is for Bing.

Follow on-page optimization for Bing
Use keywords in titles and html tags on every page. Bing prefers each page to be fully optimized with proper keywords. If you properly optimize your pages, you’ll have an easy time ranking on Bing’s search results.

Links, links, and links
Linking is a crucial SEO element. It always will be, whether for Google or Bing.

Try to make a point of always linking from extremely relevant sites. Also, be aware that Bing places value on outbound links more than other search engines do.

Keywords
Bing seems to prefer that each page of your site should contain no more than two keywords. Follow this rule. Optimize your site for one main keyword and use another one as a secondary keyword.

Don’t forget meta tags
Meta tags may have slipped into the back seat for many SEO specialists because Google no longer places value on them. Google does encourage the use of meta tags, but not as an SEO factor.

With Bing, however, it is highly recommended to utilize meta tags for every page. If you’re doing it already, good for you; keep it up! It’s likely that most of your traffic comes from Bing.

Follow current SEO best practices at all times
We’ve yet to see a clear-cut difference between how Bing ranks sites vs. how Google does it. Both engines keep that information pretty secret.

We can only derive hints from the rules and guidelines they have issued to webmasters. All that can be said is, whatever best practices are out there for SEO, follow them religiously.

Pay no attention to the rumors that Bing places greater value on sites that are old or prefers those that are newer. It’s been my personal experience that some of my posts have popped up on Bing’s first page several days after publishing.

As I said, just follow SEO best practices that you’re already following, and Bing will most likely reward you accordingly.

Conclusion
In my humble opinion, what’s good for Google will mostly be good for Bing. Just keep on doing what you’re doing in terms of SEO and continue to use variations in content type and link-building strategies.

For more information on our link-building services, contact us and we’ll take a look at your site for a free assessment.